Wayne C. Booth: The Effect of His Being

When I think about Wayne Booth's effect on my life and career, I think first of the narrator's comments about Dorothea Brooke at the end of George Eliot's Middlemarch (1956: 613): "The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive." "Incalculably diffusive" nicely describes Booth's effect on the world of literary and rhetorical studies, and "incalculable" neatly captures his effect on my own efforts in these worlds. Booth has deeply influenced my ideas about teaching, narrative and narrative theory, rhetoric, and even how to carry out my duties as editor of Narrative. Whenever I try to distinguish among what I learned about these things from Booth, what I learned from another extraordinary graduate school teacher, my dissertation director Sheldon Sacks, and what I figured out on my own, I soon realize that the quest is futile: I've internalized their ideas to the point that I can only sometimes tell where theirs leave off and mine begin. Yet I have also come to realize that stopping my reflections on the debt to Booth at "incalculable" is too easy, because it short-circuits my inquiry, keeps me from looking too closely at just how much I owe Booth. In that spirit, I have recently written about my experience in Booth's classroom and its continuing influence on my work (Phelan 2006). In that same spirit, I take a closer look at another dimension of my indebtedness: what I learned from the ways he conducted his professional life.

At the outset, though, allow me to make it clear that I have never been big on the idea of role models. I have not wanted to be "just like Wayne," "just like Shelly," or just like anyone else, and on the rare occasion when someone tells me I'm a role model, I shudder. It's not that I'm incapable of admiring others or that I think I'm a terrible person or don't want the responsibility of having someone look up to me. It's just that I've always felt there was something off about the idea. I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was I meant to be—and neither are you. Let's figure out who we are individually and then try to be better versions of those selves rather than trying to be like someone else. Sure we can learn from each other, but don't put anyone in the role of the model to emulate. Nevertheless, as I've been trying to get beyond "incalculable" in thinking about my debt to Booth, I have softened my position. I can see now that as our relationship evolved from that of teacher-student to that of mutual friends I moved, without consciously doing so, from focusing primarily on Booth's ideas about narrative and narrative theory to focusing primarily on his ways of being in the world and how I might learn from them. I also realize now that, because Sacks passed away when I was still an assistant professor, I naturally began to pay more attention to Booth. But I kept paying attention because Booth was teaching me a lot without even trying to. Here is some of what I learned.

"Chicago Critics, of Whom I Am Supposed to Be One"

Since the winter of 1973, when I first read The Rhetoric of Fiction as an MA student, I have pored over more than a million words of Booth's engaging prose (many of them numerous times), I have written several essays directly about his work, and, as noted above, I have internalized an untold number of his ideas. Yet when I try to call up verbatim quotations, the one that comes most readily to mind is not one of his nicely turned metaphors (e.g., "We have looked for so long at foggy landscapes reflected in misty mirrors that we have come to like fog" [1983: 372]) or even one of his definitions of a critical concept such as the implied author or the unreliable narrator. Instead, the one that I recall with the least...